Frodo’s Return (11/18/2016)

Hello All!

Made it back up to the ranch Friday evening, it get’s dark so early now, nothing to do but enjoy my wife and a cold beer.  This past weekend, with winter coming on quickly, we wanted to get the wood stove installed and operational.  That was the big push, and even though I knew we would run into snags, I thought it would take about half the day on Saturday. ha.  I was way off, again! hahahaha

Started out good.  Sheralee had already made our new wood stove (Frodo) table, so we confirmed the height to see what adjustments needed to be made.  Turns out, we were about a half inch off I think…so not bad.  While she cut down the table legs, I worked on the ceiling hole.

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This was the table before I started cutting.  I took our chimney ceiling box, and made a center hole, and then marked out the radius of that whole on the roof.  It was 10″ across, so drilled some guide holes and got the grinder out.

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We actually ended up with the best circle hole to date, with a grinder.  Unfortunately, first snafu was here.  Somehow, our hole and inside ceiling box didn’t line up.  We really couldn’t figure that one out, but oh well.  We adjusted.  It was either cut the hold 2″ wider on one side, or cut down the ceiling box. We opted for the ceiling box.  Then we had to account for the concrete backer board we installed, so off we went.

This process took us just about all day, and were finally lighting a fire before sunset, working great. I sealed the hold around the external chimney with some LocTite Roofing sealant.  We lite a fire and ah man…so nice to have Frodo back up and working.

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This time we went with a single-wall interior stove pipe instead of the double-wall pipe we did last year.  What a difference it makes in internal heat.  We also opted to go from the back of the stove this time so we can use the top to heat up water and pans.  It really works well.

Sunday morning, first task was to seal up the roof opening and install this high temp silicon boot we got for metal roof flashing.  We purchased this boot from Amazon.


It is specifically designed for metal roofs so I thought it could work with ours, and sure enough…it did.  This thing is amazing!

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I used indoor/door silicon sealant underneath the border, which is made of the boot and aluminum to conform to your roof contours.  I then used self-trapping screws around the base and more sealant on top of that.  It is awesome…I can’t say that enough.  If you are ever going to install a chimney through any metal roofing, this is the way to go.

Sure enough, Sheralee had rain Sunday night and Monday, a good amount of rain, and no leaking!  That is another first for us! ha.  We are learning!

Sunday I had a list of things to accomplish, which I can’t quite recall what they were, but one of them was installing our new wall heater in the kitchen container.

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I got this thing off of Amazon as well, and was rated #1 small space heater in some website like ‘electric heater reviews .com’ or something like that.  I added a little Honeywell thermostat to go with it.  It will run off 120V and should heat our space nicely. This is really being added to the kitchen side as the cats will soon be living up there and thought they might need heat during the evening while Sheralee is at work.  Haven’t fired it up yet, as the new batteries will be installed this coming weekend.  I have to still terminate the circuit in the breaker box too.

That brings me to the other great stuff.  As you know we have been working on getting four acres cleared just south of our house.  Well, it is done.  The first batch of pictures was from last weekend when there were still some trees standing near us, but still it was such a shock when I saw it.

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Now, all of that is gone!

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WOW!!!  Huge difference.  So now, we have four acres cleared.  We will still have some more work done in the coming weeks.  Our man on the spot will bring his grader back up there and try and even things out and scrape off the remaining wood and rocks.  Very exciting.

So, along with that is I was able to borrow my bosses DJI Phantom 4 drone this past weekend.
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Let me just start with….this thing is AWESOME!  I was able to get it up and running Sunday, with a slight learning curve.  I will show a picture here, and then link that to the larger picture.  Also, I will post a movie that I made…quite on accident, but it turned out really really cool.

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Here is the link to the larger image…(click here)  You can actually see Sheralee and I under the tree to the right…trying to shade my phone so I could see where I was flying. ha.

Here is a movie (125MB), but soooo cool!  (click here)

We want to map out the acreage using the drone…give us a better overhead view of what we want to do.  So, here is what is on the horizon.  We are putting deposits down on two puppies, that we will get in January.  That is very exciting for us!!  I will officially be working from the property Monday’s and Friday’s, every other week, starting this coming Monday!  This is huge for us.  Oh…we just had HughesNet satellite internet installed this past weekend too.  Very cool!

We will be going here and there this holiday weekend…Ranch to Phoenix, Phoenix to Vegas, and Vegas to Ranch.  Good times!  Very exciting things happening!

If we don’t talk to you, everyone have a safe and thankful Thanksgiving.
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